Chasing Dante - it’s … done?

When is a book done? When is any artwork finished? It’s something I’ve been thinking about lately. Two of my favorite quotes are:

Art is never finished, only abandoned - Leonardo da Vinci

The show (SNL) doesn’t go on because it’s ready; it goes on because it’s 11:30 - Lorne Michaels

I think about those quotes a lot as my latest book moves slowly but relentlessly towards publication.

I really thought the book, Chasing Dante, would be completed about two months ago. The book was written, and was—for all intent and purposes— complete, two months ago, but the final editing process has been excruciating.

A ‘one last review’ resulted in hundreds of minor corrections and changes. Those changes unintentionally introduced all sorts of minor errors. Talk about best intentions going badly—I think I made it worse after I ‘tidied it up!’

It’s ironic how just minor changes can unintentionally introduce tiny additional errors. 

One of my mistakes is that I didn’t completely finish reviewing the book before the layout was created. I thought it was very close to finished, but after it was laid out, I started a final read-through. I was only expecting to find minor errors, but I ended up making lots of changes. Were they necessary? They seemed so. But I am aware that every time I read through something, I seem to make some changes.

Double-jeopardy, we’d also created the Kindle Book version from the original text. It turns out that changing a Kindle book—in Kindle Creator—isn’t easy when you have many changes. While you can go in and change a word or two here and there easily enough, you can’t just replace the text of a whole chapter. The Kindle Creator app—at least the Mac version—is not particularly robust with lengthy text selections.

We had to rebuild the Kindle book from the start by creating a new book and re-importing the combined chapter text. That’s not an incredibly long process (compared to the amount of time spent editing the original text layout), but it’s still more time and effort than it should be.

Long story short, I ended up doing two more reviews/read-throughs that I hadn’t expected, and it took more than two months. But I think I’m done now. I’m happy with it. I feel that I’ve got to the point where I’ll just keep making tiny changes, and I’m worried that I’m just changing it one way in one round, and then changing it back in the next review!

But I'm done.

We just have to finish up the publication details, and press the Publish button!